The Night the Brandenburg Gate Opened

For twenty-eight years, the Brandenburg Gate stood sealed — a monument trapped behind concrete and barbed wire, its grand columns watching over no man's land in divided Berlin. Soldiers patrolled its shadow. No one passed through. Then on the evening of December 22, 1989, something extraordinary happened. Workers dismantled the barriers. Floodlights blazed against the sandstone. And when Chancellor Helmut Kohl stepped through the central arch from the West, over 100,000 people were already gathered on the eastern side, weeping and singing.…